Robert K. Massie

Massie came to the last Romanovs through his own family: his son had haemophilia, and Nicholas and Alexandra, published in 1967, argues that the Tsarevich Alexei's illness, and his mother's desperate trust in Rasputin, shaped the collapse of imperial Russia. It turned a political story into a family tragedy readers could feel, and some historians think it gives the illness too much weight. His Peter the Great won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, and his later Catherine the Great is equally readable. Narrative history at its most absorbing.